In response to Israeli bombing raids on Gaza over several months, US President Joe Notrump today declared that “Palestinians’ right to defend themselves,” while “all very well in theory,” is unfortunately “not really practical in today’s world.”

In the current world situation, the President explained, Palestinian resistance to Israeli attacks—for example by shooting back—is terrorism, an unacceptable crime which is defined as doing to our friends “any fraction of what we regularly do to our enemies.”

However, the President did hold out the hope that Palestinian self-defense could in the future become acceptable “if Palestinians would just go along with what we and the Israelis have planned for them.” Doing that “might well make Palestinian self-defense unnecessary, even if there were still some of them left.”